Frictionless, perfectly competitive traded-goods markets justify thinking of purchasing power parity (PPP) as the main driver of exchange rates in the long-run. But differences in the traded/non-traded sectors of economies tend to be persistent and affect movements in local price levels in ways...

An influential literature argues that trade promotes knowledge flows and technology transmission between trading partners. This literature focuses on ‘direct’ R&D spillovers which are related to the levels of R&D produced by the trading partners. In this paper we argue that ‘indirect’...

This paper examines growth in output per person in 17 OECD countries from the late nineteenth century to 1989 considering the possibility of several breaks in trend. In all cases the unit root hypothesis is rejected in favour of a segmented trend stationary alternative. 1951-73 is shown to be an...

Using a dynamic factor model that allows for changes in both the long- run growth rate of output and the volatility of business cycles, we document a significant decline in long-run output growth in the United States. Our evidence supports the view that this slowdown started prior to the Great...

This paper provides evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects on trade from switching among three types of de-facto exchange rate regimes: freely floating, currency bands, and pegs or currency unions. A cottage literature at the interface of macroeconomics and international economics focuses...

We use a dynamic factor model to provide a semi-structural representation for 101 quarterly US macroeconomic series. We find that (i) the US economy is well described by a number of structural shocks between two and six. Focusing on the four-shock specification, we identify, using sign...

We use the structural factor model proposed by Forni, Giannone, Lippi and Reichlin (2007) to study the effects of monetary policy. The advantage with respect to the traditional vector autoregression model is that we can exploit information from a large data set, made up of 112 US monthly...

This paper attempts to identify the sources of real exchange rate fluctuations since the collapse of the Bretton Woods period. We use a structural VAR model with recursive long-run restrictions to decompose the real exchange rate series into three components, associated with supply, demand and...